The Expendables: Completely Expendable Experience

August 27, 2012

Remember last week, when my Meetup group had free tickets to The Expendables 2 premiere (like that movie needed a sequel!)? The theater had solidly overbooked and so we were asked to come back later. We should have listened to all the reviews we heard over the week, and just skipped the movie altogether. But it's hard to say no to free tickets, and so we found ourselves at the Scotiabank Theater, even vaguely excited about finally getting to watch the movie.

You can Photoshop movie posters, but you can't ease away the wrinkles from the cast in every single frame - Bruce Willis' face was the only one still capable of movement. Personally, I found it painful watching yester-year greats try to rehash their signature moves for a forced script that tried to massage everyone's egos... give me their individual classic movies any day. 

Storyline: When Nepal, China, Albania, and Russia are all part of a single story, you stop looking for lines weaving them together. Quick summary: everyone tried to kill everyone else just because they could, and I would have liked it if more people had succeeded. 

Constant gunfire with the occasional explosion made for a pretty consistent soundtrack, occasionally interrupted by man-grunts, which made up the majority of the dialogue. The rest of the dialogue consisted of cliches so trite that Bollywood would turn its back on them. 

As you can see, the movie annoyed me on several levels. If it were a rom-com, I may have been able to dismiss it as mindless entertainment. Yesterday though, when I was watching all the pointless violence and the throw-away references to justified wars, all I could think of was this:

Wild Sound Festival

30 June, 2012

This weekend, I'm trying to see how far I can push myself before starting to feel my age. That's what it feels like in retrospect, at least! Friday evening, we shopped till we dropped, and discussed Ikea's wily plans to make us shop some more. Saturday, during the day, I volunteered at the Pride Festival  and was thrilled to see parents bringing their kids to the event too. What better way to tell a child that they can just be themselves, no judgment? Beautiful. 

And then, last evening, though it felt like my feet and hands were falling off in different directions after all the barricade-moving and heavy labor at Pride, I just had to check out Wild Sound Festival. It's a feedback event where the audience gets to watch, discuss, and then vote on a set of short films, handpicked to ensure we're watching movies from different countries, across different genres, with different budgets. Considering it's free-entry, and first-come-first-seated, the hall filled up remarkably fast with people who were soon talking to each other though many had come there alone.

The evening started off rather darkly, with a man tracing the history of dementia in his family (La Calma, Spain), and it got even more rocky with Netherland's entry, Year Zero OFFF, which was kind of a wordless Doomsday prediction. To end the last act on a cheerful note, we witnessed a soldier's interaction with the inevitability of death in the Canadian movie, The Soldier.

A moderated session followed, where the three movies were discussed by the group who'd come in early enough to secure seats in the main theater (and I was so glad I got a seat there, since I had lots to say!) while the ones in the side theater watched the comments through a live stream. We then went on to watch two slightly longer short films, Ireland's Nowhere in Particular, and an American Film Noir style flick, Vodka 7. While these two films also spoke about life and death, they were definitely perceived to be more optimistic than the first set of films. 

In addition to the five short stories we'd watched, I felt like I watched many more short stories as the personalities of the audience members came shining through in the moderated discussions. From the ex-army man who said he related with The Soldier, to the critique in the front row who bemoaned the Mustang's dent in Nowhere in Particular; you felt like you were getting a little bit of insight into the people watching the movies. There are 2-3 more events like this coming up, so let me know if you're interested and I can tell you when they're happening.

The Ukrainian girl I spoke with during a break mentioned another short film event, Short & Sweet, at No One Writes to the Colonel (Little Italy). It's free-entry Mondays, 8-10pm EST. See you there one of these Mondays? Let me know if anyone's going and I'll make my plans. For now, I'm a bit busy shifting houses and then watching the fireworks at Niagara Falls to celebrate Canada Day and then moving all that lovely Ikea stuff into the new flat and putting it together to make a home. Internet-less times ahead. Perfect time to hit Toronto's Public Library, which I've heard so much about!

Movie Premiere: Take This Waltz

June 28, 2012

I’ve been looking forward to Take This Waltz, in part because of the fantastic promotion for the movie. There’ve been TV trailers, there’ve been photo-booths at events, there’s the website Conversation About Love (which you should definitely visit, it has some cute captures, and more practically, it's proof of people really engaging with a marketing campaign). I was definitely kicked about my free passes from Mongrel Media which got me into the movie preview at the Manulife Center. This is a quick review.

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You know, you watch the trailers, you read the IMDB snippet, and you think, “Ok, I know what this movie’s all about, I know how it’s going to go.” The movie Take This Waltz works, in part, because there’s a lot of material in the movie that the trailers don’t even hint at. Sure, it’s a movie about  all-consuming infatuation and the sometimes-tedium of marriage and choices. But in the end, it’s more about life than it is about love.

The movie has an all-talented cast of Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby and Sarah Silverman, so you already know you’re going to see some powerful performances. I’ve seen a little too much of Williams being depressed this year, but she did have some fantastic whimsical, almost manic dialogues to work with. Silverman was her usual witty and wise self, I’d really like to see her take the lead in a mainstream movie. I don’t have much to say about Kirby, his role was pretty much that of a boy-toy prop and he played it well, but Seth Rogen, in my opinion, stole the show with his restrained performance and his very realistic responses. His character definitely grows on you through the movie and becomes more than a 2D figure.

In fact, you identify, sometimes uneasily, with every single one of the characters at some point in the film, and the often-funny dialogues keep them just real enough not to be too artsy. Sarah Polley directed reality into so many scenes in the movie and made the whole thing not only believable, but also intense. There was some interesting camerawork and audio in the movie, which had me fascinated as a student of film studies. Every frame’s practically a portrait, and I enjoyed scenes where the sounds inside/outside a house were interspersed with each other. The movie’s filmed almost entirely in Toronto, and I may be reading too much into it, but the city did seem like a good backdrop to the characters’ restlessness and pace of life.

As the movie progressed, you found yourself wondering how it would end, how this series of events could possibly end. I think the scriptwriters had the same question because there were several points when you nearly got up, thinking it was over, but no, wait, there’s yet another shot. It did drag a little, but I think the viewer was offered several ways in which it could have ended, and I personally thought the real ending was about as fair or as unfair as life itself. You left the movie thinking that if the story had played out in real life, that’s probably what would have happened.

I’m not sure if mainstream audiences will appreciate the movie, it’s kind of the answer to ‘What happens after a happily ever after?’ and that’s never a comfortable place to go. But it definitely makes you think, and talk, and set aside your own day-to-day concerns for the two hours in which the movie runs. I personally enjoyed it: a man who desperately wants to rescue a woman who can’t be rescued from her perpetual sense of emptiness.

 Is the woman too smart to ever be truly happy? Is her husband the smart one for figuring out how to just stop looking for more? A marriage without conversation seems like a lonely place to be… you can only see if it works by pushing it to the brink and seeing if you have words beyond the carnal and the cuddly.

All in all, it's the kind of movie that makes you want to sit down with a coffee afterwards and dissect every dialogue, every camera angle, every sound bite, to bits. I'm glad I watched it and I have a whole new list of places I want to see in Toronto after watching it!